Riddles at the Bottom of a Pool

The hotel pool sat empty at 2 AM, its surface still except for the ripples from where she trailed her fingers. Elena shouldn't be here—she should be in bed, asleep beside her husband of seventeen years, or perhaps she should be back in Chicago, finalizing the divorce papers. But here she was, in Egypt, pretending the conference had necessitated this trip.

She'd spent the evening at the hotel bar watching a baseball game on television—some American channel the bartender had found for her. She didn't even like baseball, but her father had. She'd sat there nursing gin and tonic, feeling like a sphinx: inscrutable, ancient questions carved into her features, demanding answers she couldn't provide.

"What do you want?" David had asked her three weeks ago, his voice cracking. "I don't know what you want anymore."

She'd had no answer. The riddle of her own dissatisfaction had gnawed at her for years, wearing her down from the inside like water through limestone.

Now she slipped into the pool fully clothed, her silk blouse heavy against her skin, creating a whirlpool of fabric and water and something like surrender. The water embraced her, cool and undemanding. How long had it been since someone had held her like this? Without expectation, without the weight of seventeen years of accumulated disappointments?

She floated on her back, staring up at the Egyptian sky where distant stars pressed against the darkness like secrets trying to surface. The sphinx had guarded its riddles for millennia. Maybe some questions weren't meant to be solved. Maybe some pools were meant to be drowned in, not waded through.

Tomorrow she would call David. Tomorrow she would say something definitive—yes or no, stay or go, rebuild or burn. But tonight, suspended in this temporary world between air and water, between baseball and ancient stone, between the woman she'd been and the one she couldn't quite become—Elena allowed herself to simply exist, riddle and answer both, incomplete and somehow complete.